FileSharing

Over the past couple of weeks, two of the largest torrent sites on the Internet shut down. After KickassTorrents was shut down by the U.S. Government, meta-search engine Torrentz.eu also said farewell yesterday. Looking back over the years, they are not the only torrent giants to have fallen.
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The long running and popular file sharing site ExtaBit.com has been knocked offline today, in what has been labeled a mysterious act that has left millions of users without access. ExtaBit.com was at one time one of the largest file sharing sites in the world, boasting millions of visitors to the service per day and over 7.5 petabytes of files. Sources close to ScrollDog say that the site has had ongoing legal issues that may have ultimately forced the hand of operators and ultimately caused the shutdown of the business.
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The former operator of USAWarez.com and USATorrents.com, who has served more than two years in prison for copyright infringement, has outed several prisons for showing pirated movies to their inmates. One of the prisons mentioned says that the matter is still under investigation.

In 2010 Richard Humphrey was sentenced to 29 months in prison for operating several pirate sites, including the popular USAWarez.com and USATorrents.com.

Earlier this year Humphrey, who is a well-known figure in the warez community in various roles, went back to jail after he violated his probation. This time he was sent to Lorain Correctional Institution in Ohio, where he was surprised to see that pirated copies of “Ride Along” and “Wolf of Wall Street” were being played for inmates.

According to Humphrey the movies were shown while they were still playing in theaters and had clear earmarks of being pirated copies.
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For those, who are tired to download fakes, spam, virus infected, password protected or incomplete torrents, I've created a list of free torrent sites that provide download for verified files only. All these sites are open for all, public and do not require registration.
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A patent application by telecoms giant AT&T details a traffic management system set to add a little more heat to the net neutrality debate. Rather than customers using their Internet connections to freely access any kind of data, the telecoms giant envisions a system in which subscribers engaged in "non-permissible" transfers, such as file-sharing and movie downloading, can be sanctioned or marked for increased billing.

When a consumer subscribes to an Internet package, either at home or on a cellphone, it’s generally accepted that he can use it for whatever applications he likes, whether that’s web browsing, sending or receiving emails, watching video, or listening to music.
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Days after a California driver escaped a traffic conviction over wearing Google Glass behind the wheel, the search company's augmented-reality device is once again testing the law. On Saturday, an Ohio man was detained for several hours by federal agents who suspected him of recording "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" in his local movie theater using Glass's video function.

"About an hour into the movie," Columbus-based Tiberiu Ungureanu told The Gadgeteer, "a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says, 'follow me outside immediately.'"
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The number of illicit digital copies is not as high as reported by industry trade organizations, according to a large-scale analysis of BitTorrent file-sharing of videogames.

Anders Drachen from the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University and the PLAIT Lab at Northeastern University as well as Robert Veitch from the Department of IT Management at Copenhagen Business School analysed a the filesharing of some 173 computer games over a three-month period between 2010 and 2011.

They set out to study videogame piracy because "despite the substantial debate about digital game piracy, there is minimal objective information available about the relative magnitude of piracy, or its distribution across different countries nor across game titles or game genres"
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ThePirateBay, which has seen it’s share of the spotlight in the past, has had consistent pressure on their domains once again in recent days. Since TPB first opened doors they have had nearly 20 different domain extensions. In the past 2 days alone, TPB has gone from .sx, to .ac to .pe. The .SX belonging to the tiny island of Sint Maarten, .ac belonging to the UK’s Ascension Island and .pe belong to Peru. The most recent .pe domain will only be a temporary solution as Peru authorities will be soon to seize this domain as well. As a result ThePirateBay will move to a new extension shortly. If they were able to acquire thepiratebay.so or thepiratebay.ag it would be ideal. These are two of the safest locations (Angola & Burma or Somalia) to register domains and it would make sense if the ship attempted to sail there.
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In light of the Hotfile judgement that ended with the company being forced to pay $80,000,000 in fines and either ceasing it's operations or implementing fingerprinting technologies to prevent copyright infringement, file hosting companies around the world are scrambling to sure up their businesses.

ScrollDog has been in contact with an MPAA representative by the name of Eddie Hoang. He works within the MPAA's Tech department and advises the company on what software file hosting services should be using to combat copyright infringement. Mr. Hoang stated that after the Hotfile news broke, his office received dozens of phone calls from various file hosting companies inquiring into the legalities of their operations.
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A site founded by a former moderator of one of the most popular file-hosting and uploader hangouts has admitted today that his site was a honeypot setup to capture data on pirate activity. WDF, a former senior staff member at popular discussion forum WJunction, says that in the 12 months since his site went online he’s been grabbing information about uploaders and file-hosts. “I suckered shitloads of you,” he said today as he announced the acquisition of his site by a U.S.-based anti-piracy company.
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BitTorrent is without a doubt the best way to share large files online. Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s inventor recently found out that torrents with more peers are not always quicker.

We have written many articles on how BitTorrent users can speed up their downloads in the past. We have focused on tweaking the client’s options such as the max upload speed and the maximum number of incoming and outgoing connections. Tweaking your client can indeed help with speeding up your downloads but many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum. Picking the right torrent is one of the most important part and the torrents with the most peers are not always the fastest one.
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